LIMA, Peru (JTA) — The story of Lima’s only Jewish bakery begins on Christmas. On the eve of the holiday in 2016, Deborah Trapunsky was baking challah for a non-Jewish friend who wanted a unique gift for her boyfriend. Her friends had always loved her challah, and she enjoyed sharing this aspect of her culture […]
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(JTA) — When a film about a group of Israeli youths who visit former concentration camps in Poland premiered on Sunday at the Berlin Film Festival, its Israeli producer took the microphone after the screening to decry the state of his nation. “The new far-right government that is in power is pushing fascist and racist […]
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(JTA) — A member of the European Parliament was turned around at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on Tuesday and sent back to her native Spain after attempting to enter the country on a diplomatic mission to the Palestinian Authority. Israeli officials cited the fact that the politician Ana Miranda, who represents the Galicia […]
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(JTA) — Members of a neo-Nazi group rallied Tuesday night outside the Broadway theater that is hosting “Parade,” a play about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia. “It was definitely very ugly and scary, but [also] a wonderful reminder of why we’re telling this particular story, and how special and powerful art […]
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ODESSA, Ukraine (JTA) – A year after Rabbi Mendy Wolff spirited 120 children and staff away from the Mishpacha Orphanage in this war-torn country to the safety of Berlin, he is preparing to bring them home. That’s not because the war is over — far from it. One year after Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, […]
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TRUSKAVETS, Ukraine (JTA) — Nearly 600 Jews stand shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes trained on the young man leading the service to close out Shabbat. The crowd sings a soulful havdalah tune that lifts up its final words: “hamavdil ben kodesh l’chol” — “the One who divides between sacred and ordinary.” It looks like a Shabbat gathering anywhere […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — In 2004, June Hersh and her family sold the Bronx-based lighting business that her father founded almost 50 years earlier. Hersh, along with her mother, sister and their husbands, all worked there. The day of the sale, her sister, Andrea Greene, turned to Hersh and said: “We did well! Now, […]
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(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk. The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal […]
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(New York Jewish Week) – In “Pictures from Home,” a new Broadway play, a photographer takes on a nearly 10-year project to chronicle the lives of his aging parents. As the son snaps pictures and interrogates his parents in their Southern California home, the three offer very different versions of their shared past and spar […]
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(JTA) — Moses Elisaf, thought to be the first Jewish mayor of a city in Greece, died at 68 on Friday after a brief battle with cancer. Elisaf, mayor of Ioannina since 2019, was hospitalized during a work trip to Athens in December, the Kathimerini newspaper reported. He extended his hospital stay on Dec. 19, […]
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